University of California, Davis
Physics Department
Condensed Matter Seminar
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Dr. Choong-Shik Yoo

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

"High Pressure Materials Research at the APS"


Application of high pressure significantly alters the interatomic distance and thus the nature of intermolecular interaction, chemical bonding, molecular configuration, crystal  structure, electronic structure, and stability of solid. With modern advances in high-pressure technologies, it is feasible to achieve a large (often up to a several-fold) compression of lattice, at which condition material can readily transform into a new physical and chemical configuration. The high-pressure thus offers enhanced opportunities to discover new phases, both stable and metastable ones, and to tune exotic properties in a wide-range of atomistic length scale, substantially greater than those achieved by other thermal and chemical means.  Futhermore, combining modern laser and synchrotron x-ray technologies the high-pressure truly becomes a powerful tool in materials research.  In this talk, I will describe new opportunities at the third-generation synchrotron APS for high-pressure materials research and discuss about a few examples of phase transformations that we have recently observed in simple molecules and transition metals at pressures of 100 GPa.

Thursday, May 27, 2004
4:10 p.m., 416 Phy/Geo